Critical Essay by Michael Hamburger

In the following essay, Hamburger follows the "microcosm" of Trakl's verse vis-a-vis the poet's life.

Of all the early Expressionists, Trakl was the least rhetorical and the least dogmatic; and he was an Expressionist poet only insofar as he was a modernist poet who wrote in German. Expressionism happened to be the name attached to modernist poetry written in German; but Trakl would not have written differently if there had been no movement of that name. Nor did he have any contact with the initiators of the movement, all of whom were active in Berlin; whatever he had in common with Hoddis, Lichtenstein, Heym, and Benn, he owed to the Zeitgeist, not to any program or theory. If Trakl had written in English...